A model and tools for supporting parallel real-time applications in Unix environments

As real-time applications become more complex, it becomes increasingly important to provide both a clean model for their development and the ability to verify that their execution matches the development model. In addition to becoming more complex, soft real-time programs are becoming more mainstream, and as such are being run on platforms running some variant of Unix. It is even more important in these environments to be able to monitor a program and understand its behavior. We describe a frame scheduler that provides a simple model to the real-time programmer while maintaining considerable flexibility. We motivate and describe the implementation of FrameView, a set of tools closely coupled with the frame scheduler. Since FrameView and the frame scheduler were developed in conjunction with each other and are tightly coupled, they provide a powerful and efficient means for programmers to implement, analyze and modify soft parallel real-time applications. The frame scheduler is fully implemented in IRIX 5.3, and FrameView is in beta release. In this paper, we describe our experiences building and using the frame scheduler and FrameView.